Donna Williams
Why write about oneself?
Everyone has a different reason.
I wrote the first of my four autobiographical works, Nobody Nowhere, on the verge of suicide after a wild half-crazy life with abuse, homelessness and ultimately hope for belonging only to find I was terrified of real closeness. I had a last inkling of hope that I couldn’t truly say I’d tried my hardest to cope if I’d never fully disclosed the nature of my own private world. So I wrote out everything that mattered in my feelings and decided to give it to one child psychiatrist in the hope they could tell me what kind of mad I was and whether there was hope for answers and belonging. My intention was to then shred it, burn it and leave this world. Instead it was passed on to his colleague, then from her to her publisher, from him to an agent and from there out into the world it became a number one international bestseller. But why write three more?
My second autobiography, Somebody Somewhere is so completely different to the first and exposed a world of such different, forgotten citizens of the world, that the story had to be told, to give a voice to the voiceless, to be a starting point for solidarity and building bridges. It too became a number one international bestseller.
The third work, Like Colour to the Blind exposed three very controversial areas that I felt strongly about; the visual fragmentation of visual perceptual disorders, the importance of augmented and alternative communication systems for voiceless people and the search for selfhood buried underneath stored learning, something so many people struggle with in silence until its often too late.
The fourth book, Everyday Heaven was about the simultaneous discovery of sexuality, journeys in orientation and at the same time coping with loss in a two year span in which I lost three of the closest people in my life.
So I wrote each for very different reasons, to hope and to survive, to shout and to stay sane.
Film Rights to Nobody Nowhere
Hollywood News
So you heard there was going to be a film made of my book Nobody Nowhere?
Well, Touchstone Pictures, together with Julia Roberts’ company, Shoelace Productions, did have the original option to the film rights to Nobody Nowhere for five years whilst they struggled to come up with a working script. The rights were then sold to another Hollywood film company for another few years as more writer’s struggled to envision how to convert the international bestselling book into film. Then it was resold again. This time, though, something different happened.
When a company buys the option to develop a film the first step is finding a writer. In the case of Nobody Nowhere this means finding someone who can envision how to take a story that spans 26 years and takes around 48 hours to read non-stop in a book, and condense that into a film which is around two hours long. The 26 year span in Nobody Nowhere covers three different continents and the main character, Donna, would have to be captured at several different ages. No matter how incredible a book is, if they can’t envision converting the power of that book into a film of about 2 hrs length, then they get stuck. We were waiting for someone who could do that successfully.
In the process of reading potential scripts, I mapped the structures and tricks used in scriptwriting. I am a natural systematician. I feel systems intuitively and I map them just like an architect can feel out the structure of a building, an engineer can feel out the mechanisms in a tool, a linguist can map the structure of languages. I mapped the system of scriptwriting. Like with writing, art, sculpture and music, however, I had no idea that I could actually write a film script. It wasn’t until the second producer, through his year long correspondence with me said he felt that the person who would ultimately be the best one to write the film script would be me that I considered that a serious possibility. Magically, I encountered a wonderful, funny, fountain named Beverly Nero, and our email conversation turned to film writes and the fact that Nobody Nowhere was once again up for option. Beverly Nero (daughter of Grammy award winning composer Peter Nero) picked up the option, and supported my belief I might write the screenplay. Just as Nobody Nowhere was written in 4 weeks, so was my first draft of the screenplay. The book went on to become an international best seller.
The film, Nobody Nowhere is now under option. The movie is set in the UK, throughout England and Wales, over to greater Europe and tells the Australian side of the story from Donna’s perspective.
The focus of the film would be on the year that changed everything, Donna’s 26th year, an invitation to journey into a depth only touched on in the book.
It was the year I first met ’the Welshman’, ’Sion’, a soldier with multiple fractures of the soul and more than one battle on his hands who became my real life ’mirror’ after which the cold flat glass surface of my best friend, my mirror reflection, could no longer compare. And it was in this year that I stood on the edge of a breakdown but instead found my scream through the writing of Nobody Nowhere, the book that came to give a dynamic, human, real-life living face to the word Autism and explode the existing stereotypes laying bare its incredible diversity and ultimately the essential humanness we all share.
Nobody Nowhere dramatically changed the treatment, the education and the statistics forever of those with Developmental Differences and opened the doors for worldwide social, political and cultural changes in that field. More than this, Nobody Nowhere was read by ’ordinary people’ and those on the peripheries alike, ironically giving a voice to many non-autistic men and women around the world as they felt gripped and swept up, often deeply exposed through my own story to their own deeply hidden, sometimes imprisoning truths.
Commuters on the motorway in Toronto listening to me on the renowned CBS Morningside program of the lovely late Peter Gzowski were so gripped by what they heard they pulled over onto the hard shoulder to listen. The much loved late Peter Jennings flew to London to capture my story for his Person Of The Week show on America’s ABC.
Nobody Nowhere sold over half a million copies in 20 languages worldwide. Covering deep social issues far beyond the scope of Autism, it challenges concepts of sanity and normality in the face of ignorance, brutality and deprivation and brought empathy and an inspiring sense of celebration and hope to mainstream people and solace to a diversity of the most marginalized, disempowered and alone people in society. The film, Nobody Nowhere is for all of these people.
Nobody Nowhere was, is and has always been more than ’an autism story’.
We are more than the packages we come in and sometimes when we open those packages we surprise ourselves and all those we touch.
If you would like more information about the film, please join the mailing list for announcements about "Nobody Nowhere" the film.
To contact the producer please email : NobodyNowhereLLC(at)socal.rr.com
Today
Today I’m proud to say I’m still brutally Donna. I still get things upside down, back-to-front, can’t tell left from right most of the time or what day it is. I’m still intermittently meaning deaf and meaning blind and I live life in a ’dietary wheelchair’ that holds my head together and gives me reasonable cohesion, together with the help of a small amount of medication that helps me know the difference between me and anxiety, me and a mood disorder, me and a compulsive disorder and I can proudly make a cup of tea these days, recognise it 2 seconds later and actually follow through and drink it.
I am ALWAYS asked ’what about Willie’, ’what about Carol’... I gotta say that’s the most frequent question. And I’m gonna reserve telling you folks the answer because I’d spoil the story as I told the whole thing in the sequels Somebody Somewhere, Like Colour to the Blind and Everyday Heaven. You can also visit my paintings gallery, sculpture gallery and music stop at my home page www.donnawilliams.net .
See you there! ...Donna Williams *)
www.donnawilliams.net
www.nobodynowhere.com
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I know that these are available at Amazon.de but no one has been able to answer my question.
I see that MHz will carry (or did carry) two Donna Leon mysteries- September- in German with English subtitles.
Where can I buy these on dvd with english subtitles? |
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I am trying to find CD that has music from motion picture "Cowboy" by John Williams. Where can I find such? |
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used to listen to a tape series when i was a kid. i don't know the name of the series, but my favorite one was "donna's uninvited guest". this would have been early 80's, but it probably wasn't new then so i'm thinking late 70's. |
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